Modern Romanticism

“Who would I be, if I avoid it?” she asks, swiping a missing falling tear at her cheek as if she forgot the last.

I check her posture. It stations itself, firm with preparation for what emotion she moves towards. She wants to embrace it, I know. A cold darkness. She has made a shell her bed, while that darkness, a surrounding to spurt all her bloody confessions, she wishes to connect herself. I might tell her, “Do not do this, if you want to survive,” while I realize, and have always realized, that such syllables have no effect.

Whoever wants to die will signal death without a source of light. She believes in an ending more than my words that begin, that have begun, and will continue a repetitiveness in these beginnings. I will, as I just might, continue to repeat what I say aloud to her; though, to my words, she will hurl them into a puddle if only to fracture her reflection.

In love, I am, though it isn’t enough. To bring her close into arms that are another bed, she will, or she only might, choose to lay in them. With tears, she’ll continue to add rust to her structure. In disappointment, but with relief, she’ll welcome its collapse.

She says, “I need to find peace, but not here, not with you, and not with these surroundings.” She points to one source of light after another, proving what she means and reminding me of what I already know. After this, she says, “You are the one who is engulfed in what I cannot be connected with. You are the one who has unified yourself with this bright world, while hope, even as a word, remains alien to me.”

She points to the sun. I cannot see it, not directly. Though, this current time has been closing in on evening. Should another hour or two pass, I will see the sun with greater clarity. For clarification’s sake, I will be able to understand what she means when she gestured in that direction.

This is something neither of us can avoid. Without beginnings, there are endings involved. She has chosen to set her own sun, to block out all sources of light, as I cannot be her lighthouse to direct her naked, bruised form to solid earth.